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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

CrossOver 9 revamped reinvented and a must have

Yesterday, we received word that a new version of the popular CrossOver product by CodeWeavers had been released. Version 9 is out and it promises a new look, more versatile interface and increased compatibility with a broader line of products.
For those unfamiliar, CrossOver is a proprietary version of Wine that is used for running Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux. While there are other products that offer similar functionality such as Transgamings’ Cedega, CodeWeavers is the only one that immediately sends patches they create back to the Wine project to further enhance it’s functionality, making it.. in our opinion, the better choice of the two.
One sore spot for a number of Linux users of late was the adjustment by Apple to make it more difficult to view it’s Quicktime movies and trailers with anything other than Quicktime itself. There are a number of ways to get around this but none are particularly easy. For this reason, we decided to test out CrossOver 9 and see if it could allow us to watch trailers from Apple.com in our native Firefox browser on Linux without any effort other than installing Quicktime through their tool.
Here are the results of this test:
First off, installing CrossOver is as simple as downloading the trial (or purchasing the product for as low as $39.95) from their website here: http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxlinux/
Once installed, simply launch the product and you’ll be greeted with an installer such as this:
This is definitely a more streamlined look from CodeWeavers and we like it, nice and simple and gets to the point. Also, they have added a number of new options to the software installer as you can see below:
It’s nice to see the inclusion of Community Supported products as well and it also gives credence to the statement that CrossOver can run quite a few applications without issue..
As we mentioned earlier, we’re going to test it out by installing Quicktime 7.5 and seeing if the browser (Firefox) picks it up as a plugin and allows us to play trailers on http://www.apple.com/trailers (a favourite site of ours).
Let’s get installing shall we? Simply select Quicktime from the list and hit next and the installer gets to work straight away:
Once the installer completes, it’s time to check and see if Firefox picked it up as a plugin.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the latest version of Firefox (3.6) picked it up without any issue at all.
Now for the moment of truth, will it play our beloved trailers? Let’s see.
As you can see, it worked like a charm. Quicktime loaded quickly and started playing right away without any issues at all. The video was seamless just as if we were running it through a windows machine.Full Review